Forefront 10 - Animation and Unity

The topic I want to discuss today is simply animation itself, with a focus on classical, 2D animation.
The fact of the matter is that most indie-games are 2D - making games in 3D might require skills beyond what small teams can provide, and it is also extremely timeconsuming. Furthermore, as triple-A games frequently have dozens upon dozens of people working on them, every artist is very specialized, and a master of his or her craft. With 2D, anyone who can draw can pretty much draw both backgrounds, spell effects, characters, icons and so on.
Because most indie-games are 2D, they are also animated thereafter, and so I will have a look at some of the classical principles, and how they apply to other projects and my own, and top off with a few examples of different styles of animation.

(Note: my go-to book is The Animator's Survival Kit, and I am not allowed to post pictures from it, so this might have fewer pictures than I would like)

Many 2D games, and pretty much all of 'pixel-art' 2D games, use frame-to-frame animation. This means that every frame in every animation is drawn separately, then stitched together. This affords the animator the use of all of the traditional Disney principles, like squash and stretch and exaggeration (note that some of the principles are to do with staging - for obvious reasons those cannot be controlled by the animator when someone is actually playing the game) - for the frame needed, the animator simply elongates or exaggerates what is needed, and the effect is palpable, as thousands of traditionally animated works can attest.
In my game however, those two principles are not applicable (which is why I am discussing them). My project is based on Paper Mario, and more context-specific, on paper cut-out animation, that is, every joint is a separate piece, which is the rotated - think smooth stopmotion animaton.
While it is definitely possible to use the scale-parameter in Unity during an animation, this will often prove to be woefully inaccurate. An alternative approach
I chose this form of animation because I wanted the game emulate the Paper Mario style, and because it is much much faster. Additionally, and I like this point, the different joints can be update graphically, and this will, if done correctly, transfer into the Unity animations, and so the look of the model can be changed even after the animations are done - this is nigh impossible with frame-to-frame (I certainly have no idea on how to do it), and when you are a learning artist, this is a golden opportunity to iterate on characters.
One way to achieve the mentioned 2 principles is to include alternative joints, which you then 'swap out' with the original when needed, but this conflicts with the points made in the previous paragraph.

Looking at a series like Paper Mario, it can appear to use both frame-to-frame, and joint-rotation animation (Forward Kinematics). The 'Idle' animation in Colour Splash for example, for both Mario and other characters, appears to be a simple loop between 2 different frames - not really animated at all, really, but this fits with the paper-craft style of that particular game.
In my own game, which has edged away from this style, I have created several joint keyframes (for as many as 120 frames per animation) and then allowed Unity to interpolate between them with its Animation editor.
One problem with this approach that I cannot envision a solution for is how grounded the animation feels - with frame to frame, each leg is simply draw on the ground, but with frame rotation, as the upper leg, lower leg and foot joints all rotate together, getting the foot to feel like it actually impacts with the ground is exceptionally tricky.
For this reason I may opt to change to normal frame-to-frame later if I improve sufficiently as an artist, and if and when I am completely happy with the design of all my characters... most likely not.

To include it in this context, Curse of Monkey Island uses a large number of traditional frame-to-frame animations.

One really interesting new project on the 2D animation game scene is the game Cuphead, by studio MDHR.

Trailer from E3 can be viewed here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TjUPXAn2Rg

Cuphead uses a design and animation style similar to the old Fleischer Studios cartoons of the 30's - it's brilliant, bonkers, and quite a visual treat to behold.

Returning to Unity for the final stretch of this post (this turned out longer than I had thought), I will briefly talk about external animation programs for 2D animation, like Spriter, and Spline for example. These engines greatly increase the options and speed with which animations can be created, and they also support such things as distorting meshes, bones, and Inverse Kinematics - meaning, amongst others, that the model can finally feel grounded! I am fairly sure the animations can be transported into Unity as well, with the only downside being that they aren't free.
Animation packages can also be purchases on the Unity Asset store, such as Puppet 2D (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/14024)

I think that's all I had to say on this subject!

Note that while the assignment brief says we need at least 10 blogposts, and while I hope to include more, this all depends on how the next couple of weeks are going to go - having less time than planned hasn't helped.


Sources:
Spriter from BrashMonkey. 2016. Spriter Features | Spriter from BrashMonkey. [ONLINE] Available at: https://brashmonkey.com/spriter-features/. [Accessed 03 September 2016].

Spine: 2D skeletal animation for games. 2016. Spine: 2D skeletal animation for games. [ONLINE] Available at: https://esotericsoftware.com/. [Accessed 03 September 2016].

Principles of Animation. 2016. Principles of Animation. [ONLINE] Available at: http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/aim/a_notes/anim_principles.html. [Accessed 03 September 2016].

 Cuphead - in Don't Deal with the Devil. 2016. Cuphead - in Don't Deal with the Devil. [ONLINE] Available at: http://cupheadgame.com/. [Accessed 03 September 2016].